


Obelus

by venus woman and giant saurian (grayglube)



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Hemlock Grove, IT (2017)
Genre: Eldritch Abomination Roman, F/M, Miskatonic University, Other, Roman is his own warning, vague college AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 01:35:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12288432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/venus%20woman%20and%20giant%20saurian
Summary: If Derry is a town whose veins are filled with grey water, whose skeleton is charred bone, whose life-breath is the smell of burning hair, the meat and blood of a logging accident and the rot of dead children, then Arkham is the lasting thrall of a place that doesn’t know it’s been living in its own grave.





	Obelus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delirante](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delirante/gifts), [ohyellowbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohyellowbird/gifts).



> I knew I wanted to write something for IT, and I figured as outlandish as the separate ideas that went into this were they kinda played nice with each other. Non-con for Roman, who has a pattern of really awful behavior. If you watched HG and were fine you'll be okay with this.
> 
> For the non-con/rape tag on my hurt/comfort bingo square.

It wasn’t just fear It fed on.

 

Bill’s guilt and grief, Henry’s envy and rage, Ben’s hope and shame.

 

There’s poison soil where her heart grows so, she wonders, what does it feed on from her?

 

* * *

 

 

If Derry is a town whose veins are filled with grey water, whose skeleton is charred bone, whose life-breath is the smell of burning hair, the meat and blood of a logging accident and the rot of dead children, then Arkham is the lasting thrall of a place that doesn’t know it’s been living in its own grave.

 

* * *

 

 

It looks like her father, but, she’s always been his little girl, then and forever so it’s not quite the surprise it might have been, besides, those times are fewer and farther between.

 

It looks like Bill as often as it looks like Henry.

 

Sometimes it’s even Patrick Hockstetter, who she taunted once.

 

He’d never have made it through Night of the Living Dead, she’d thought after that long summer, sitting in a different movie theatre, in a different town.

 

He would have waited out the final half beside the popcorn counter in the theatre lobby just like he had for Child’s Play.

 

* * *

 

 

They’d been so full of fear. That’s what it does, fills a person whole.

 

Overflowing, she feels it, brimming over, wet and afraid.

 

When all that was gone they weren’t filled differently with something like bravery, they were only hollow.

 

They were empty.

 

They were empty and there was nothing for it to rend them apart to find, nothing for it to pull from their insides.

 

They didn’t feel anything then.

 

They weren’t afraid of their parents, they weren’t afraid of the dead or ghouls.

 

They weren’t afraid of clowns.

 

Strength left no room at all for any of that.

 

She’s full of something else now anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

The thing about Beverly is that she lies.

 

She lies about her father.

 

She lies about herself.

 

She lies about whose kissed her and how many times she’s wanted it.

 

If it _had_ only been once it wouldn’t have been so easy, again, and again, and again.

 

Her hair grows and she only gets taller, there’s only more room inside of her to fill up and she’s not anybody’s little girl anymore.

 

* * *

 

 

It doesn’t just feed on fear.                                            

 

There’s a lamprey mouth between her legs and white paint behind the boys’ ears, the taste of rust lingers, a bathroom only the losers could see painted over like the bright candy red sopping the crotch her panties or the line of the promise cut across her life line ready for some monster’s signature on it made with teeth.

 

* * *

 

 

When she hadn’t been able to be afraid of a dead man she’d been filled up with the truth, with what she’s been running towards, because the sooner she’s made it back, the sooner it’s done.

 

And, if she’s not afraid anymore, then she wonders what she is.

 

She knows that one day she’s supposed to go home but there’s no need for that just yet.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s hollow but she’s trying to be full again.

 

The sawing between her legs slows, a voice, eyes in the dark. “Are you alright?”

 

She remembers eyes.

 

Lambent yellow.

 

She smiles and sighs, reaching arms and hands. “I’m fine. Keep going.”

 

She remembers teeth.

 

Rows of them.

 

“Are you sure you’re in to this?”

 

Concern.

 

There’d been little of that.

 

“Yeah, hey. Come ‘ere,” she coos.

 

Getting fucked has always been as easy as being kissed, after a while, after enough practice.

 

* * *

 

 

The sound is a familiar strangeness, behind her eyes had burned for days pulled into weeks stretched over months after the lights in them had left her like an empty casket.

 

The itch behind them starts again, an autumnal shedding of all the trees until they raised bony finger towards the sullen sky.

 

It’s the season someone says.

 

Season of the witch, she thinks.

 

The boy two rows over and three seats forward, tilts and turns and looks at her, he’s smiling. He waits for her when class has finished.

 

She doesn’t stop.

 

He doesn’t linger.

 

She wonders what he wants, but won’t ask him first.

 

* * *

 

 

The grey wool color of the day lingers for a long time even in the dusk hours, it paints the campus like a picture of the past.

 

Miskatonic is like a map of a place that’s been built over so many times the foundations might be another world all their own and not what’s holding up the one she’s living in.

 

She doesn’t doubt that she is alone in her singular past, Derry an anomaly beyond some veil of the world as it pretends to be, not truth, but the world has never really told the truth about anything to anyone anyway.

 

But, she doesn’t doubt there are some people who wouldn’t roll their eyes or wonder if she’s part of the group that crowds together once a week in the basement archive to consume pot brownies and leaf through half decayed census reports and zoning permits in a labyrinth of boxes kept for historical importance, the only things that might prove Kingsport, Innsmouth, or Dunwich ever really existed at all, _(she is.)_

 

She staggers out one night, the moon waxing gibbous and bright but swallowed by the starving dark that can never manage to swallow itself whole.

 

The stink on her and the sticky, acrid burn of wet, tangy smoke, lingers thickly on the back of her tongue like cum or blood and doesn’t disappear even when she’s drained her water bottle and lost it with a toss into the skeletal hedges..

 

There’s a steadying arm around her skinny waist, holding her up and helping her to stumble past the library stairs and the cafeteria’s quad.

 

“Careful, you’ll break an ankle.”

 

She can hear the rich kid simper through his false caution.

 

“You stare at me in Lit,” she says.

 

“You touch yourself and think about my fingers.”

 

“Is this the part where you drag me into the bushes?”

 

“What’s your favorite law and order.”

 

“SVU, duh.”

 

“Then you’ll like this next part.”

 

Roman Godfrey grins in the dark and she can see every single perfect white tooth in his too wide mouth.

 

“I’m going to puke on your shoes.” She warns.

 

She hits the ground with both knees as he promptly lets go of her. They’re bloody when she rises.

 

* * *

 

 

The book is easy.

 

She’s known since she was two months shy of thirteen how to read it. The fact that it’s in German means very little, the fact that parts of it are in something even more complicated than that are a simple afterthought.

 

In the dead space where she learned the sounds and colors and spectrum of a soul and space and time and what was still sleeping on the outer reaches of expectation, of conscious discovery, on the edges of what’s believed to be their quiet existence.

 

Something’s about to get loud.

 

* * *

 

 

It rains.

 

It comes from the broken sky and washes into the storm drain.

 

It soaks her to the bone.

 

* * *

 

 

They go back to her off-campus apartment and he pushes her gently.

 

Back and shoulders hit the bed and her legs dangle, he’s on the floor, licking gravel and crusted blood from her shredded knees until they begin, again, to bleed.

 

It seems to be enough for him, since they don’t fuck. His mouth tastes like vodka and sucked on pennies and hers like cheap weed and chocolate, they both have the lingering chaser of ashtray on their teeth.

 

Her knees leave full moons on red up under his ribs, his hard-on hot through his slacks.

 

He sucks her neck a different color and she scratches the back of his neck sunburn pink.

 

It’s too fucking good.

 

* * *

 

 

He points at her book and asks her if it is what he thinks it is.

 

She grunts noncommittally.

 

“Need some help?”

 

There’s a smile and it’s full of teeth.

 

He talks about an extensive family collection of old editions and she is suddenly more curious than she has any right to be.

 

* * *

 

 

_‘Are you still my little girl Bevy?’_

 

She wakes up, startled. The library is silent and she’s fallen asleep on her arms, her hands numb, she complains while she shakes them and Roman tells her if she were to masturbate with them that it would feel like someone else was touching her.

 

Her tights are ripped along the inside of her thighs.

 

A truly nightmare on elm street occurrence, she wants to tell him it never feels like anything other than someone else touching her but she figures he might have already guessed.

 

* * *

 

 

Her aunt worries that she isn’t getting enough sleep, that her studies have been keeping her up.

 

“It’s not that,” she assures her. “I have a boyfriend.”

 

Roman Godfrey isn’t really meant to be anyone’s boyfriend seeing as he should be dead and death stalks his heels like a black fucking dog.

 

* * *

 

 

It doesn’t look like her father. It’s just a boy with lips and teeth and that thing between his legs that she’s feared in a developmentally stunted way of a little girl, she feared her own blood once too, and shame.

 

 _“Daddy,”_ it bleeds out of her mouth now, plaintive, and harsh because she can barely keep up.

 

It doesn’t have a name, not one human speech can give real voice too yet but she doesn’t need to name it to make it real.

 

“Fuck, Bev.”

 

She didn’t say it to get him hot, she didn’t say it because she wanted to, she said it because her dead father is watching from the corner of the room.

 

* * *

 

 

She knows what she’s doing.

 

She knows what she’s been going to do.

 

She floated once.

 

She saw once, the dark shapes of the world breakers, world eaters, god killing gods, dead gods, old gods, elder ones, eldritch shapes upon the black fabric of the deep dark well from dying stars and lost light that was deeper than the night.

 

So, she knows the truth and she knows how to read the fucking book.

 

* * *

 

 

The things from the dark star well deep of space out of time are _worse_.

 

“ _They float too_. _Forever_.”

 

The taste in her mouth is real enough, the shape of tongue and teeth and slim shoulders under her hands while hands with just enough force in them to make it really good and _very_ good pull her hips up, push them down, hold them tight to the bed.

 

Fucking pillow talk she can do without.

 

* * *

 

 

Is it strange that this boy whose smile reminds her of blood and who’s got skin pale and perfect enough to be stage make-up sits down beside her, not across, beside, because he likes to press his thigh against the line of hers and lean on an elbow to slant his sideways stare at her more fully makes her what she thinks happy might have been once?

 

“Hey, Bev?”

 

“Yes, Roman?”

 

“Do you have a cigarette.”

 

“Yes”

 

“Where are they?”

 

“Get your own.”

 

Hand, long fingers in the pocket of her dress, turning it between her legs, box edge of her pack catching between her legs, finding the cleft of her and one look at his face says he knows, says he’d put his fingers there too if she didn’t just fumble to slap her pack and his hand back towards the table.

 

* * *

 

 

There are scars on his chest that are as ugly as he says he is on the inside.

 

She wants to tell him no one’s a beauty when they’re a cadaver.

 

He smiles like she’s real funny.

 

Something prowls between the buildings, he grabs her by the elbow and drags her inside. “Come on, let’s go.”

 

She wants to push him so he’ll stumble and fall, but something is outside in the dark and once the door shut it howls.

 

She wonders what rich boys who used to have everything in the world are afraid of.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s not as if she didn’t know, she just forgot.

 

The color of outer space is …,

 

She remembers Ben _, ‘don’t go girl,’_ and the color of the inner space of his mind, not his kiss, waking her up, their small kid hands pulling, rending, tearing her out of something, stitching her back into the fabric of the pallid world.

 

* * *

 

 

Roman Godfrey has seen some shit.

 

He tells her that before he tells her to dream of something nice, that he was dead, once, probably more than once _(she can relate, kind of),_ that he killed his mother _(patricide isn’t much different),_ he’s going to fuck her like he’s fucked other girls who told him ‘no,’ because he scared them with his lost boy eyes and distance _(she can’t really say anything with the edge of his hand between her teeth),_ he doesn’t mind that she’s on her period _(his blood in her mouth isn’t the worst part about what’s happening.)_

 

He wants her to dream of something nice.

 

She doesn’t sleep anymore, _(“good fucking luck.”)_

 

She pretends anyway but never does forget that night he thinks she forgot about, _(until she reminds him.)_

 

And she must sleep, but she doesn’t wake up not knowing.

 

She’s showered in the night, dressed again and passed out on the couch in his apartment.

 

He comes from the bedroom in geriatric striped pajamas and just stares back at her, she’s cowlicks and cowardice, she knows what she wants to say but not how best to so that the impact would make him sway on his heels.

 

“Mornin’,” is all she manages.

 

“Forgot you passed out her last night.”

 

His cool lies are what her aching head needs, a soothing hand to make her swoon back into the couch cushions.

 

There’s a power in knowing what other people are scared of.

 

Roman Godfrey’s not scared of retribution or consequence, he’s scared of rejection.

 

He still wants her to like him, like him as the person shaped monster he is. She can taste his hesitance to ask her to stay for breakfast.

 

“I’m starving, brunch?” he asks, once he’s found his balls again.

 

She smiles and groans.

 

“Can I borrow a shirt?” she asks, he obliges, because there’s blood of hers, and she still knows where it came from _(“nice try, fucker.”) When_ she buttons up on of his dry- cleaned favorites here are hickies on her tits and she wonders how exactly she would have been able to _forget_ with those still sucked into her skin.

 

He stares at the cups of her bra through the white of his shirt and grins again at her.

 

She ruffs up her sleep stuck curls and sighs. “Come on, Creepo. Get dressed. I’m hungry.”

 

* * *

 

 

He’s not quite beyond the realm of the eldritch horrors and lurking, lurching fears.

 

So, he’d died, and his best friend who’s no more sentient that a fucking beast now, ate his goddamn heart.

 

Well, there’s something else inside his chest now.

 

It’s sleeping inside of him, traveling fast from the north and finding all the empty space inside of him to burrow.

 

It’s waiting for spring. Maybe.

 

* * *

 

 

She waits awhile before she spoils all the fun they’ve been having. More his fun than hers, if she’s being honest.

 

“Hey, Beverly.”

 

“Hi, Roman. Did you want to rape me on your living room floor again? Or, is this a question about the lab?”

 

His face is blank and white and makes her think he’s not even real.

 

Not real.

 

“I don’t know, you into it. Or what?” He doesn’t smile as he says it but in his eyes, is something.

 

He’s amused, she realizes. She’s upset in some tangential way, but it’s not really her that’s upset.

 

Beverly Marsh hasn’t really existed since the summer of nineteen eighty-nine.

 

There’d been carpet burn on the back of her hips that’d been raw for days and she’d complain about that before she complains about how he’s so used to getting his way he’ll take away someone’s mind to get what he wants and then move on into the normal way of things come morning.

 

Her mind is indifferent to all of it, empty and a part of a whole something else. It’s hard to linger on her feelings for just one piece of time in particular.

 

“I’m on the rag again,” she tells him because he’s a fiend and freak and is into that kind of thing. He’ll go down on her with relish and then they can compare sources for their research papers on gothic architecture or whatever dull thing they’ve both added to their schedules this semester.

 

She can read him like a book.

 

She can read all kinds of books, the one in her bag bound in pale leather has a heartbeat of its own.

 

He slings an arm around her shoulders, jocular and suddenly she feels like a kid again, in the middle of that last summer when everything was still small.

 

“Hey, you know what?”

 

“What?” she asks.

 

“You’re pretty fucked up.”

 

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t have a pulse.

 

Though she’s not in a position to judge him harshly for that, he’s rich and fucks her so deep she can feel it in her guts.

 

He and it reminds her of home and the friends she used to have, they’ve still got almost a decade to go.

 

She wonders if the world is going to last that long.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s quiet, inside.

 

There’s nothing like a soul left in her. He’d be able to taste it, but it just isn’t there.

 

It’s somewhere primordial and out of touch, something that you can’t see even with a goddamn NASA telescope.

 

Her voice is just a clever imitation, a cassette taped over from a separate recording.

 

She has the shape of Beverly Marsh and the words and the past but she’s not really a person, she’s not really anything.

 

He was born nothing so he’s not in the position to offer her any advice on her survivor’s guilt or _special little girl_ status.

 

* * *

 

 

She recognizes the eyes.

 

The teeth.

 

The lights.

 

It’s just his living room track lighting, expensive, ambient orange, the music is some tinkling melody that might be the sounds stars make when they move, he’s rough, too rough, she bites the hard line of his hand, he looks down at her face and grins.

 

And grins wider.

 

She screams and chokes and tosses her head and it’s repulsive how hot he is for how much blood there is between her legs, he’s not a fucking monster, not yet, it’s all her but the glee in his expression as he’d pulled the string of her tampon had been some Christmas morning kind of shit.

 

 _(Horrific, really.)_ And she thinks ‘God, how long has it been since I felt fear like this.’

 

And, he’s whispering against her ear, groaning out an orgasm that leaves her a little bit messier.

 

He’s fucked out next to her, repentant already, smoking one of her cigarettes and looking down at her suddenly, commanding her to forget it ever happened.

 

She wants to spit on him but she just stares past him at the lights and feels like she’s floating as he rinses her down in his pristine and pretentious claw foot tub, a modern simulacrum of past fixture.

 

It’s rich kid bullshit.

 

She wishes he’d just throw her in the creek.

 

* * *

 

 

“I guess blood doesn’t scare you anymore.” He says offhandedly, too suddenly for it to be a passing thought.

 

“You think you retained that?”

 

“What?”

 

“You taste the inside of someone’s mind and remember it forever.”

 

“What the fuck are you talking about.”

 

His lips are cherry red under her lipstick, she paints one eyelid and below with smudged fingertips.

 

“We aren’t who we used to be anymore.”

 

* * *

 

 

She remembers the taste of it in her mouth, the sight of it lingering on the sea-green tile of the bathroom floor, the smell of it on her bedsheets and on him.

 

Beside her, slanted across the foot of his own bed, Roman smokes, soft mouth plush and slick.

 

“You’ve got a mouth built for blowjobs.”

 

“Yours isn’t bad either, what do you think?” He rolls to his back, cock like a pagan monument tight against his navel. “Want to suck me off?”

 

“Fuck you.”

 

They finish their cigarettes.

 

He sits up to bend low over her breasts, kiss her sternum while stroking her knees, turning towards her feet, he lies back down and reaches for her far leg with a long arm, rolling her over him.

 

“I’ll eat you out while you do it.”

 

From there it’s only about tasting each other with their mouths.

 

* * *

 

 

Graduation comes and there are red balloons filling her dorm room, he sits on the floor under them, blowing up a long balloon and twisting it into some savage animal’s shape.

 

“Hey, Bevy?

 

“What, you fucking clown?”

 

“Ouch. Clown? I’m a force of nature baby. Rock you like a hurricane.”

 

“Scorpions, real original.”

 

“Don’t you want to come home, Bevy? See it again? You’ve been dreaming about it.”

 

“So, what happened to the real Roman can happen to me?”

 

She shakes her head, _(no, fucking thank you.)_

He scoffs. It scoffs.

 

“I got my heart ripped out by someone I thought I loved, who’s still stalking me. I’m Roman, I just had a leak that needing fixing, like you. We all get filled up with something, right? _Someone_ , Bevy. Tell me you’re still my girl.”

 

* * *

 

“What are you planning to do with it anyway?”

 

“Send it back.”

 

“Want some help?”

 

“We aren’t friends, Roman. We just fuck sometimes when you aren’t playing telephone with whatever brought you back from the dead.”

 

“ _’Whatever’_ brought me back?”

 

“ _Something_ ate everything between aorta and inferior vena cava, you’re a corpse.”

 

She adds punctuation with her cigarette and he back steps.

 

“And you’re a corpse fucker.”

 

“I might be able to help you be a real boy again.”

 

She lies.

 

Maybe.

 

He’s smiling. “And how would you do that?”

 

She shrugs and exhales smoke. “You just need a new body.”

 

“Then what?”

 

She sits beside him on the low rock wall set behind the closed lab building.

 

“The right words, the right exposure, some magic words. Easy.”

 

He chokes on the smoke of his cigarette. “I think you’re overestimating your abilities.”

 

The books jolts awake in her bag, she smiles.

 

In the rain, sheltered by the overhang of the science building she thinks of home.


End file.
